Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Day 351 - Impossible Menger Burr

After richgain's excellent guest posts walking us through Burr Tools on Day 348 and Day 349, we couldn't resist giving it a try. As I think we've established, I love Menger sponges and I'm kind of a jerk. So I made a burr puzzle that can never be assembled.

Settings: The red menger cube was printed on a Replicator 2 at .3mm layer height in 10 minutes, without raft or support, on an acrylic platform. The white cross was printed on another Replicator 2 (don't judge, they had a warehouse sale for the last remaining Rep2's and... well...) at .3mm layer height in 8 minutes, with raft and support on a glass platform with tape.

Technical notes, Burr Tools flavor: I have to give serious thanks and appreciation to the author of Burr Tools, Andreas Roever. Burr Tools has a lot of features that I haven't even attempted yet, including triangle and sphere grids and a whole lot more. And it's free. In addition it solves the puzzles you construct. And it's smart about it; for example, the menger+cross puzzle I made has a solution if you can get the cross into the cube. So it has an "assembly". But it doesn't have a "solution" because you can't actually perform the assembly. This is reported correctly by Burr Tools in the left column of the picture below. Very impressive and useful!